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How are we to understand Matthew 24:34, where Jesus says, “This generation will not pass away” until he comes again? Skeptics point out that we are approaching 2,000 years now since he said that, and he still hasn’t come.

The first thing we have to do is recognize what it is Jesus is talking about. In Matthew 24 Jesus is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The skeptics have gotten this wrong. And they have gotten it wrong because a great many Christians have gotten it wrong before them. Jesus isn’t talking about the end of the world; he’s talking about the end of Jerusalem.

How do we know this? Well, early in the chapter, the disciples came up to Jesus to point out to him the finer points of the temple. And by all accounts the temple was quite an extraordinary building, with massive stones, and decorated with gold and silver. The disciples were impressed.

But Jesus said, “You see all these [things], do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one s…

Early after last year's election, I began saying that the best hope we had of recovering some semblance of political sanity is if Obama and the newly elected democratic majorities in Congress would push their agenda too hard, too fast. Which is exactly what they have done. They have clearly been out of touch, not only with economic realities, but with the American people. In spite of polls showing a significant majority of Americans disagreeing with Obama-style health care reform and the enormous increase of federal spending on various bailouts and so-called "stimulus" packages, the libs have continued to push. And they have done so with shady backroom deals. Not only the ends but the means have been nauseating.

This is what is behind Scott Brown's victory yesterday in the Massachusetts's Senate race over Martha Coakley. Not to mention the fact that Massachusetts already has a government health care plan at the state level similar to what the dems are wanting to s…

The passage reads:18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, 20 because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. (1 Peter 3:18-20, ESV)This is a notoriously difficult passage. There are two major interpretations:

First, there are those who believe the passage teaches that after his crucifixion, and before his resurrection—while his body lay dead in the grave—Christ himself (in his own disembodied spirit) preached in the underworld to the spirits of those who perished in the flood.

But who were these "spirits"? Some say they were the righteous dead of the Old Testament era, and that their “prison” was the abode…

Not long ago I watched an old British comedy film from the 1950’s, in which a young man of the upper-middle class had made a working-class girl pregnant. The girl’s indignant father demanded that the young man should marry his daughter, a demand whose justice he understood and at once agreed to. The audience howled with laughter at the primitive idea that the future birth of child created an inescapable obligation on the part of the father. In less than half a century, the prejudice of centuries had been overturned, made to appear ridiculous, and replaced by another… (p. 24)

From Theodore Dalrymple’s In Praise of Prejudice, chapter five, “The Effect of Pedagogy Without Prejudice”:Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop of supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four- year old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal will understand the sovereignty over choice that is now granted to those who have neither experience nor powers of discrimination enough to exercise it on the basis of anything other than the merest whim, without regard to the consequences. By abdicating their responsibility in this fashion, in the name of not passing on their own prejudices or preconceptions to their children, and not imposing their own view of what is right upon them, they enclose their children within the circle of their childish tastes. In the name of the struggle against prejudice and illegitimate authority, they instill a culinary prejudice that, though self-evidently harmful, is far more restrictive in the long run than any t…

From whom did Jesus receive his human nature? Did he receive it from Mary, or did God create a human embryo to implant in Mary’s womb?

We are talking about what is called in Christian theology “the incarnation” — that is, God becoming man, or taking on human nature, or as John put it, the “Word” becoming “flesh” (Jn. 1:14). The Latin word for flesh is caro, hence the doctrine of the in-car-nation of Christ—his taking on human flesh (nature).

The incarnation is one of the most perplexing mysteries of the Christian faith. There are a number of things in the faith that are very difficult for us to wrap our minds around, and many people stumble at this. They say they can’t believe what they can’t understand. But this has always seemed odd to me. It seems to me to be something we should expect – that the Almighty and Eternal God who made heaven and earth and everything in them, should be unable to be fully comprehended by his creatures.

A good friend, Jeremy Fruechting, has been interacting with some thoughts contained in a previous post on infant baptism. My latest response is too long to leave in the comment section, so I will post it below. For the post and Jeremy's full comments, click here.

Doug: Can you think of a biblical covenant that doesn’t have a sign? And if baptism isn’t a sign of the covenant, what is it?

Jeremy: Joshua 8, 1 Sam 18.

Doug: In Joshua 8 we have a covenant renewal with oaths sworn before God, but since it is a renewal, the people had already received the sign (circumcision) previously.

In 1 Samuel 18 Jonathan “stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt” (v. 4). Gifts of this sort were often used as signs or memorials of covenants made. In the Iliad, for instance, Diomedes meets the Lykian, Glaukos, on the battlefield before Troy. Before they fight, Diomedes asks who he is and what family he springs from. When…